By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 26 2007 (IPS)

Enraged residents of a slum on the west side of the Venezuelan capital set fire to a police station the same day that the government announced the biggest overhaul of the police force in 40 years. Just a coincidence, but also a sign of the reigning chaos.

A Caracas metropolitan police officer had shot and killed teenager Carlos Guerrero while he was reportedly handcuffed in the police station in the La Silsa slum.

Guerrero and another young suspect had been taken into custody for allegedly committing robberies in the neighbourhood, and officer Yabir Méndez killed him on Jan. 18.

The judge accepted Méndez’s explanation that he accidentally shot Guerrero in the chest when the two boys tried to wrest his revolver away from him. The police officer’s release led the furious crowd to attack the police station after the funeral.

The same week, in the El Valle district of southwestern Caracas, a young man accused of murder was killed in his home by the CICPC (the judicial police).

In the nearby district of Coche, local resident Jairo Ramírez complained that the police “turn a blind eye when crimes are committed. Security in the area is maintained by God and the crooks.”

A total of 11,579 murders were reported last year in this South American country of 27 million, according to the CICPC – an average of nearly 32 a day and more than one per hour. And in Caracas, one of the most violent cities in the world, more than 2,000 homicides were committed in 2006.

The Attorney-General’s Office reported that “homicides in police confrontations” involving 6,110 officers claimed the lives of 6,377 civilians in the 2000-2005 period.

The official version of “‘confrontation’ is the main argument used by the police to justify the deaths of civilians, and they consider that in killings occurring under these circumstances, the agents involved and their institutions are completely free of responsibility,” Marino Alvarado, head of the human rights group PROVEA, told IPS.

But the government of Hugo Chávez now aims to clean up the badly stained image of the police in Venezuela. A commission made up of representatives of public bodies and non-governmental organisations is designing a new, unified police force, based on an in-depth study of the existing problems that it carried out over the past year and presented this month.

“We estimate that the necessary reforms of the police can be implemented in five years,” said Soraya El Achkar, an activist with the Network in Support of Justice and Peace and the executive secretary of the commission, which is headed up by Interior Minister Pedro Carreño.

The main thrust of the reform is to combine the numerous regional and municipal police forces into a new unified national force.

The commission’s study reported that Venezuela has 126 police forces: 24 regional, 99 municipal, the traffic police, the CICPC, and DISIP, the political police. There are also more than 30,000 members of the National Guard, which is one of the four branches of the armed forces and has both military and police functions.

In all, there are a total of 123,000 police functionaries, or 457 per 100,000 population, far higher than the developing country average of 350 per 100,000. But they are inefficiently employed, with only 52 percent involved in actual police work, like patrols or investigation. The rest act as building security guards and bodyguards, or work in transportation or logistics.

The police force structures are rigid, and are modelled on those of military institutions. There is also a low level of professionalisation. In addition, 70 percent have no standard operating procedure manuals, and only 16 percent of the police forces require reports from officers involved in deaths or injuries of civilians, while less than 20 percent carry out investigations into such cases, says the commission report.

So far this decade, the annual statistic for the number of civilians killed for each police officer who has died in a “confrontation” has ranged from 11 to 45.

The commission also found that 754 police officers who were laid off had later been rehired by another police force, and that 1,316 active officers have criminal records.

It recommended completely eliminating the 10,000-member Metropolitan Police of Caracas and removing the National Guard from policing activities. It also proposed the creation of a new police training programme, and the establishment of a commissioner’s office to investigate human rights violations committed by the police.

“Much more is needed,” said El Achkar. “Political will is required, expressed in strategic and operational plans, periodic evaluations to orient the work, and sustained financing to guarantee the execution of the plans.”

Among the urgent measures to be undertaken are a purge of the police forces, repair and restoration of buildings, renovation of equipment, and provision of state-of-the-art weapons and technology.

In September, the Interior Ministry produced a code of conduct for the police, containing express safeguards for human rights.

Venezuelan Vice President Jorge Rodríguez announced that the government would set up three commissions to implement the reforms.

The first, under the Interior Ministry, will govern the reforms. The second will tackle the question of security through a much broader approach, incorporating ministries like that of education, and a third, legislative, commission will study the legal reforms that could be adopted in the next 18 months.

According to El Achkar, “we need a public that does not applaud things like executions and torture, and does not call for a strong-arm approach to crime, but for respectful behaviour instead. And the police reform must be assumed as a political pact, built under the most basic tenets of democracy.”

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